A few days before the crush of Thanksgiving travel began, CBS station KCNC-TV released an investigative report that showed the nation’s largest airplane deicing contractor cheating on worker certification tests.

It was a pretty big story for the station, and unusual enough that Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute interviewed the reporter, Brian Maass

about the ethical issues raised by doing this kind of undercover piece.

Full disclosure: KCNC is part of the CBS division I work for.

Charles Arthur of the Guardian describes a WordPress security vulnerability discovered by a research team at Cambridge University.

Big deal, you say. Well, think about this: By gaining entry into your WordPress account, they can find your email address. And if you use the same password for different places you might log in, a hacker can gain access to lots of information you’d rather they not have.

If you think you’ve got a secure password, you might want to be sure. This is also another reminder that it’s best not to use the same password for lots of different accounts (email, banking, social networking sites, etc.).

From the Guardian post:

So: want to check the security of your favourite password(s)? First, use the MD5 hashing page here (it’s a Javascript function; there’s nobody grabbing your password, I’d wager, though if you want to feel safe and have OSX, go to the terminal and type md5 -s mypassword – though use your password, not mypassword.

Second, paste that code into your favourite search engine. If it returns no results – well done! You’ve evaded that hack, for now.